New Yorker Robert Hammond says the most the “powerful tool” he had as he endeavoured to get his park in the sky — the now famous 1.6-kilometre-long High Line — off the ground was a solid group of community residents behind him.

“We had a large constituency and that’s what the city paid attention to,” the co-founder of the Friends of the High Line told attendees at the Toronto Park Summit this past weekend.

Nonetheless, it took what seemed like an eternity to convince both City Hall and neighbourhoods underneath the abandoned freight line in south Manhattan to save this “industrial relic” and turn it into the kind of park that saw 3.7-million visitors last year.

Hammond, 42, started his mission in 1999 when he read that the rail line was going to be demolished. The first section of the garden-in-the-sky opened in 2009 and the second was ready for use slightly less than a year ago.

Along the way, he convinced Mayor Michael Bloomberg that, once done, the tax revenue it would generate would far exceed the $153-million cost to built it.

Of that $153-million, a little over $100-million came from various government funds and the rest from private donors.

One of their biggest donors has been Diane von Furstenberg. Actor Edward Norton gave both money and sat on their board.

Hammond and co-founder Joshua David, also managed to address community concerns that the High Line would “stall development” in the neighbourhoods it cuts through.

Quite the contrary, he said. Work on the High Line has led to more than $2-billion in private investment on hotel rooms, restaurants and galleries, including the soon-to-be-relocated Whitney Museum, slated to open in 2015.

He conceded they found it “very tough” to work with the city.

“There was a lot of bureaucracy,” he said. “We had to gift wrap the project for elected officials.”

But with time Bloomberg not only supported the project but put some of his key people on the file.

Despite the hurdles, Hammond never had the issue of empowered unions standing in the way of developing the park or from what it would seem, city parks bureaucrats that have a “can’t-do” instead of a “can-do” mindset.

This has been the challenge in Toronto.

For years I have watched many of Toronto’s 1,600 parks and parkettes go to seed simply because the powerful brass at CUPE 79 adamantly refused to allow community residents to adopt their own parks.

I find it more than slightly ironic that some of the very left-of-centre councillors who supported this nonsense — Adam Vaughan and former budget chief Shelley Carroll — were front and centre at Saturday’s park summit (looking for ideas they can dismiss or promoting themselves, I’m not sure.)

Nonetheless, the union stranglehold is finally over, thankfully.

The most recent contract has lifted those restrictions and people are free to adopt their own parks without union interference, confirms Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday.

Realtor Donna Koegl is getting a Friends of the Beltline group off the ground in my own Chaplin Estates neighbourhood — in an effort to rehabilitate the beautiful Beltline trail which has been allowed to deteriorate by city officials.

Three Saturdays ago I joined dozens of community residents at Koegl’s second Beltline clean-up. We found garbage, old Bell telephone wires, junk thrown there from apartment buildings and yard waste tossed into the Beltline by lazy gardeners.

“We really need to educate homeowners not to pitch debris down there,” she said.

Koegl, who attended Saturday’s summit, said her next move is to create a membership and to help organize a Beltline Town Hall in the next few months.

Which leads me to the city’s parks officials, who seem to have a difficult time letting go of control, even though they don’t have resources to get things done in a timely manner.

That’s where Dave Harvey, the founder of Parks People and the man behind Saturday’s Toronto Park Summit, comes in.

He told the crowd he hopes to eventually build a network of 50 parks groups that can become a “city-wide voice for parks.”

Harvey makes it quite clear that it is not tonnes of money that makes parks better.

“The key factor is the number of volunteers,” he says. “It’s been found our parks are better public spaces when communities are actively involved.”

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